However, if you start looking in what he has promised and what he really has done, a new pattern emerges: it's all bullshit. He continuously makes fantastic claims that will be ready by tomorrow. It'll all be done by tomorrow, really!

Tesla's full self driving, is already here, claimed for 10 years and still isn't even close. Tesla hasn't made any new models in the past 10 years begpnd the cyber truck which is a horrendous laughably stupid thing, yet Tesla is still valued more than any other car company that make 10-100 times the amounts of cars that Tesla does.

SpaceX? We'll be on Mars in 2020, 2021, 2022, etc... SpaceX still can't get itself beyond low earth orbit and only managed to explode a banana over the Indian ocean. They're literally 1% done of what they got billions of tax payer funding from. Meanwhile they cheer every time a rocket blows up because.....fun? Ohh, how about the tickets sending people to the other side of the world in 39 minutes? Of course any high schooler could tell you 20 reasons why that's bullshit but Elon fans lap it up.

Boring company? Would make tunnels 100 times cheaper than others, really, truly! Of course anyone can do that too if you don't put in rails, emergency exits, space to escape in case of emergency, stations, etc.

Okay, how about star link? You know, those thousands of satellites that do the job of single satellites, and totally won't cause the Kessler syndrome? Yeah, use thousands of satellites in orbits so low that you'll have to replace them every 5 years costing billions. What does it get you? A slightly lower ping. This seems the most actual successful project to date that comes from him and it's still a shit show

Hyperloop? The absolute bullshit show what got tens of Billions of investment and went nowhere ever because the idea is fundamentally flawed? Even universities jumped in because reasons, it stopped high speed rail development in the US because this would be so much better, and yeah... China has tens of thousands of kilometres of high speed rail now, and the US has... Nothing.

The robots? The spandex guy, FFS... Any "real" demo of his robots has been 20 years behind on Boston dynamics and even then they had to fake most of if with humans controlling those sad machines

Did I forget anything? Ooohh yeah, the solar roofs, where he cheated too. Lots of court cases about that one

Elon Musk is a scammer, that's it

[–] frezik@midwest.social 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Compared to NASA, SpaceX is developing at a breakneck pace. The SLS has its roots in the Constellation program from 2005 which itself came from the 2004 report "Vision for Space Exploration". That was when NASA finally admitted the Shuttle was never going to live up to its original goals and it had to go.

Ares V is a reconfiguration of Shuttle hardware into a more traditional rocket. It's still taken two decades and has one test launch to show for it.

SpaceX is the only Musk company I'll defend, and it also seems to be the one that's best at keeping Elon from fucking around with them internally.

That said, the whole point of commercial launch systems is that it's not just one company doing it. Blue Origin might finally have something to show off soon, but there's nobody else at a reasonable development level. Virgin Galactic only seems interested in space tourisim. (Edit: for completeness sake, I should also add that ULA is a joke.) A bunch of small companies are doing R&D, but few have even a single small launch yet. If it's just going to be SpaceX, might as well make it a government-run company like the USPS.